President Buhari Moves to Compel MDAs and Industries to Host Data Locally

The Minister of Communications, Adebayo Shittu, has made known the plans of President Muhammadu Buhari to stop the country’s data from being hosted overseas as soon as indigenous data centres have enough capacity locally to handle data generated within Nigeria. He made this known during a visit to Rack centre, a Tier 3 data centre in Lagos. According to Punch, he said “the President will compel the Ministries, Departments and Agencies to host locally, if the local capacity could be met within a year from now.”

He further explained that the local content policy would be implemented without challenge as the policy already specified that for data centre facilities available in the country, government agencies were duty bound to patronise them. “It is easy, we have a local content policy that says that for every data centre facility available in Nigeria, industries and government agencies must patronise them and more especially when we have a facility like Rack Centre that can compete with any other in any part of the world,” the minister said. Shittu who was impressed by the world class infrastructure at Rack Centre said the president was passionate about local data hosting and there was no logic behind hosting abroad if these facilities are available in Nigeria. “As soon as we have capacity, all our data will be hosted within. We just have to be sure that we have capacity. “It is not logical for the Nigerian government or the private sector to keep patronising the foreign facilities. The plan we have agreed on is that once we have capacity; we will only resort to buying outside the shores only if the capacity is not there.”

Mr Ayotunde Coker, the Managing Director of Rack Centre said it could compete with the best in the world and that it was working towards meeting local demand. He further sated that the data centre co-location provider had doubled its capacity from 119 racks to 255 racks within seven months. “We intend to build that capacity. We have the blueprint and we have proved that it can be done by our doubling the capacity of the centre within just seven months ahead of time and within the budget. The capacity can be increased again to 600 racks within another seven months once it is identified that the market exists for the expansion.” Punch also reported that Shittu said the Buhari-led government was committed to creating an enabling environment for the private sector to thrive. “As a government, we need to encourage all private investors that are investing in the Nigerian economy in a bid to ensure that Information Technology firms grow to satisfactory levels and contribute their fair share to the Gross Domestic Product.” 

Source: Punch